I My daughter, not yet one, crawls to my chair and takes my pens and tries to steal the book I try to write in. This could be a metaphor; but who knows? My son, fresh from the bath and naked yet, steps into my boots. This could be another, but I hope not. I sit in the corner of the thick of my life, and I think…

Sorry to bombard you with poems she writes and that gets me thinking. Now war, no matter how good it feels or just, now and then, is never a good idea. It never works no matter how many thousand shiplike songs it’s launched. But what I get thinking is we could do with some poems like small arms…

A lot of my writing students, women and men in their middle years, say they wrote poetry when they were young. They say it as though it’s a thing one outgrows; for me it’s a thing I grew into. I didn’t write many poems until I was forty; suddenly it’s most of what I write. I guess I was making myself ready, and poetry’s a…
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